3 Days in South Lake Tahoe - Restaurant recommendations, please

Thanks, Melanie Wong. I saw strong write-ups for Taste of Europe, but we didn’t go there. Overall, food in South Lake Tahoe seemed underwhelming and overpriced.

We had two ‘fine dining’ dinners at resort restaurants—one at Edgewood Restaurant at the Edgewood Resort, and the other at Jimmy’s at The Landing. Jimmy’s was the better of the two, maybe our best meal in SLT—nice, deep flavors, excellent service, better value. We were a bit worried to go there because of the mixed reviews, but I think most of those were for breakfast. We were also there on a very slow night.

The Edgewood has an impressive room and a lovely view, but, while the chef seemed to be trying with lots of foams, powders, gelées, and sous vides, the flavors were just meh and it felt extremely overpriced for what you get. We preferred our meals at My Thai Noodles (solid $7.95 lunch special) and Off the Hook sushi. But we live in a state with a dearth of good Thai and sushi. I don’t know if either place would pass muster for a Californian.

Driftwood Café was disappointing for lunch, although we got the impression breakfast might be a lot better.

I just realized, we were there for four days and only had five meals. The beauty of the place somehow made two hardcore Hounds forget about food for the most part.

One thing we noted, though, was that there are two decent-looking health food stores in town already, there seem to be nice weekend farmers’ markets, and a small Whole Foods is under construction. Next time, we’ll likely just rent a place with a kitchen and cook most of our meals. We’ll also try to arrange it so we can have a dinner at Trokay in Truckee (a small modernist restaurant that seems to be doing interesting things). It was already snowing in the mountains we reached Tahoe, so the drive back from Truckee in the dark seemed too tricky to attempt, especially after a 5-course dinner.